Thursday, April 19 at noon
Urban Environmental Lab Classroom, 135 Angell Street, Providence
Dr. Lilian Alessa heads the Resilience and Adaptive Management Group at UAA, and has served on the board of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States. Her expertise is in the conceptual development and application of complex systems thinking and in the development of research strategies.

Abstract: Water resources continue to challenge societies around the world. As part of the solution, water technologies ranging from reclamation, to storage to household level conservation hardware have been implemented. In this talk we will discuss the role of technology in achieving water sustainability and question the increasing effort to ‘engineer’ water efficiency. We will also present concrete examples and tools from the emerging field of computational social science which may better inform our goals of achieving resilience through a human hydrological perspective.

Caves are unorthodox places. They provoke our imagination and they are the subject of storytelling of the most eerie kind. My father used to tell me about a certain “seven-chambered” cave from his childhood, which was said to keep treasures in its deep darkness and guarded by a ferociously rotating sword. I have never visited this cave but grew up hearing stories about it. Caves are portals into other worlds: once we have the courage to step into their darkness, touch their wet and sooty walls, crawl into their crevices, the ambiguous spaces of the cave offer us alternative temporalities. Hence the famous story of the seven sleepers, well known in Christianity and Islam. According to the story, seven young Christians of 3rd c. AD took refuge in a cave to escape persecution in the Roman provinces, and went into an oblivious sleep of 150-200 years. Caves are sites of miracles. Similarly, Prophet Muhammed during his escape from Mecca to Madina with Abu Bakr, hid in the Cave of Thawr. What saved them from the members of the Quraysh tribe who wanted to persecute them, was a spider who quickly spun its web across the cave’s entrance, making the Quraysh people be convinced that noone was hiding there. Several Seven Sleepers caves across the eastern Mediterranean have been sites of pilgrimage since the medieval period (Pancaroglu 2005) while Cave of Thawr on Jabal Thawr outside Mecca is also a site of pilgrimage today for the Hajj visitors, a holy place. What makes these places special is not simply the memory of the important events that are associated with them. Most certainly these miracles and their long term long-term persistence owe a great deal to the idea of a cave as a liminal space, as a heterotopia in Foucault’s terms (1967).

In the ancient Mediterranean world, caves were considered as portals to the underworld, the world of ancestors and the gods and creatures of the netherworld. In the specific case of Hittite Anatolia, this belief can be even further extended to springs, sinkholes and ponors, as orifices of karstic geologies. Hittites developed a specific mimetic relationship between such geologically peculiar sites and the built environment, and took interest in constructing massive vaulted chambers and sacred ponds, the so-called DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR (“Divine Road of the Earth”) monuments, such as those in the Hittite capital Hattusha.

Maritime, underwater or nautical archaeology, as it is known these days, is a relatively young and flourishing branch of archaeological research today, as Christoph Bachhuber’s guest lecture on Wednesday has elegantly laid out. Many underwater archaeological projects of recent decades have extended our knowledge of the material remains of past societies into the maritime landscapes around the world, exploring submerged coastal settlements, harbors, shipwrecks, places destroyed by tsunamis and earthquakes, and ritual deposits in lakes and river beds. Check out for instance the website of “The Museum of Underwater Archaeology” at the University of Rhode Island, or the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University, to see the variety of underwater archaeological projects ongoing around the world.

The two important contributions of these projects to archaeological research, in my opinion, are:

(1) they investigate the dynamic long-term history of the edge between the lands and the seas- the cultural history of coastal settlements and harbors which are submerged due to geomorphological processes or catastrophic events- and therefore illustrate the fluidity of coastal environments, their vulnerability.

(2) they tell us extensively about the use of maritime landscapes as landscapes of movement, inter-connectivity, travel and trade. This last point is elegantly discussed in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s Corrupting Sea: a study of Mediterranean history (2000).

Shipwreck archaeology has revolutionized the way we understand the history of seafaring through the discovery and study of numerous shipwrecks of antiquity. On Friday I spoke about the famous Uluburun Shipwreck excavated off the coast of southwestern Turkey, and the excavation of the Byzantine harbour and the series of Byzantine shipwrecks associated with it in the Yenikapi neighborhood. Uluburun Shipwreck is dated to the Late Bronze Age, approximately 1300 BCE, the time of exceptionally intensive network of seafaring, entrepreneurial trade and diplomatic exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean. Pharaohs of the “New Kingdom” Egypt, Great Kings of the Hittite Empire, and various kings of Cyprus, Ugarit, Assyria and Mitanni, exchanged letters and gifts at the time and referred to each other as “brothers” (See Marian Feldman’s Diplomacy By Design). More significantly seagoing ships such as the Uluburun ship circulated the Eastern Mediterranean in a counter-clockwise route, hopping from one port of trade to another, connecting Egypt, the Levantine Coast, Cyprus, Anatolian coast, the Aegean Sea, the island of Crete and then back to the North African coast. Uluburun ship had sunk with this amazing cargo of raw materials, prestige artifacts and wonderful rare things, including 354 copper oxhide ingots, 175 discoid shaped glass ingots, a wooden-wax writing tablet, ostrich eggshells, numerous bronze weapons, gold jewellery, stone maceheads, 150 Canaanite jars full of olives, terebinth basin and perhaps wine, Cypriot oil lamps, Mycenaean stirrup jars, logs of Egyptian ebony, cylinder seals from Mesopotamia, a scarab bearing the cartouche of queen Nefertiti. Where have this merchant and his amazing ship not stopped along their voyage?

Uluburun shipwreck presents to us the drama and the politics of sailing in the Mediterranean in the beginning of the 13th century BCE. About a hundred years after the sinking of Uluburun ship, now we know through archaeological and literary evidence that the entire mercantile network of the Eastern Mediterranean would collapse, most probably not a sudden catastrophic event but a gradual process of decline, and as a result, the so-called “Peoples of the Sea” would invade Egyptian and Levantine cities, Mycenaean palaces while the Hittite Empire disappeared all together from the stage of history. But who were these Peoples of the Sea? I hope to bring this up later in the semester.

Director Icíar Bollaín’s brilliant 2010 movie También la lluvia, Even the Rain presents us an engaging example of a contemporary water conflict from the perspective of political ecology and colonialism. The film is about a Mexican film crew (with director Sebastián) arriving at Cochabamba, Bolivia to shoot a post-colonial film on Christopher Columbus’s early conquest to the New World, the violence of these early colonizers in their search for gold over the local communities and the subsequent indigenous resistance. While hiring the Cochabambans as actors for their movie, the film crew finds itself suddenly in a similar kind of colonial/imperial situation: the famous water wars of Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1999-2000. Under closed door negotiations in September 1999, the Bolivian government had signed a contract with the multinational consortium Aguas de Tunari/San-Francisco based construction giant Bechtel to privatize water resources in Cochabamba, which lead to rocketing rates for water for the loval users. Following a series of demonstrations led by Coordinadora (Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life) in Cochabamba and some violent confrontations with the Bolivian armed police forces, the contract was annuled by the government. The events ended with a victory of ecological resistance: the returning of water rights to local communities. Even the Rain is set in the midst of this remarkable episode in the history of political conflicts over water.

One of the fascinating aspects of the movie is the way it meshes together two historical episodes of colonialism, one with the 15th century colonization of the New World and the other water wars of 1999-2000 Cochabamba. While gold is the goal for the early imperialists, water becomes the most precious commodity in the early 21st century context. The movie weaves together these two episodes of imperialist violence over place and the indigenous communities of this place and the resistance to that violence. The film within the film, the one on Columbus is set in the lush watery landscape of Cochabamba valley while the water wars take place in the scorched, waterless urban landscapes of the Cochabamba. This spatial contrast is one of the striking effects of the movie. It is therefore partly about the representation of histories of imperialism, and the continuous presence of the deep colonial past in the everyday landscapes- where the pasr and present are unavoidably intertwined. Here I would like to open the platform for discussion on various aspects of the movie and the political-ecological thoughts that it has provoked in you. Several fascinating ideas were brought up during the discussion on Friday- I would appreciate if those are further articulated here in particular.

Please find them under the relevant weeks in the weekly schedule. I will continue posting the powerpoints this way. I posted today’s lecture notes as well since they were typed up already so that Sarah could read them to you. Many thanks Sarah! I look forward to our discussion on Friday. Keep your fingers crossed for me so that I can get my voice back!

On Friday, I spoke about the intimate and physical link between our bodies and waters of our landscapes of dwelling, on how materially connected we are to the geologies of the places we live in, how we are constituted by the mineral worlds around us and in return how we build and impact them with our own interventions. Archaeological scientists have been enthusiastically investigating the chemical residues of local geologies in human and animal bones and teeth, with the help of radioactive isotopes. Read more about this in Brenda Fowler’s “Written in Bone” (Archaeology 60.3, 2007). This sedimentation of local geological chemistries in our bodies are made possible with our consumption of water and plant foods, and the study of ancient human remains allow archaeological scientists to speak about where those individuals have lived, what kind of diet they maintained, what kind of heavy diseases or injuries they had and if they were exposed to specific types of bodily labor. (Highly recommended readings on this: Joanna R. Sofaer’s The body as material culture: a theoretical osteaoarchaeology and Rosemary Joyce, ; 2005. “Archaeology of the body,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 139-158.). Phenomenological approaches such as Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams point similarly to the ontological basis of our being in the world, the sensory, the visceral aspects of our immersion into the matter of the earth. In phenomenology, we are not quiet spectators of the landscape around us but we enter into mutual exchanges with glaciers, mountains, lakes, and seas, as Julie Cruikshank elegantly shown in Do Glaciers Listen?. I will try to follow up on this in the coming lectures.